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This supplement may prevent birth defects

If you're concerned about the health of your unborn child, a new study indicates that a Vitamin B3 supplement may actually help prevent birth defects.

Worrying about the health of your unborn child can be nerve-wracking, and many people are willing to do just about anything to make sure the child is healthy. A new study provides some hope to those people, suggesting that a simple vitamin B3 supplement could prevent miscarriages and birth defects.

Scientists at the Victor Change Institute in Australia were trying to figure out why some women haev multiple miscarriages, and why some babies get multiple defects. They were surprised to discover that they seemed to have one thing in commong: a deficiency of a molecule called NAD, which helps organs develop.

You can make sure your body has enough NAD by eating diets rich in eggs, cheese, salmon, nuts, seeds, and turkey, for example, but you can also get it by taking supplements of vitamin B3.

“Congenital malformations can be manifested as combinations of phenotypes that co-occur more often than expected by chance. In many such cases, it has proved difficult to identify a genetic cause. We sought the genetic cause of cardiac, vertebral, and renal defects, among others, in unrelated patients,” the intro to the paper states. “We used genomic sequencing to identify potentially pathogenic gene variants in families in which a person had multiple congenital malformations. We tested the function of the variant by using assays of in vitro enzyme activity and by quantifying metabolites in patient plasma. We engineered mouse models with similar variants using the CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats)–Cas9 system.”